The Sea Mystery

A review of The Sea Mystery by Freeman Wills Crofts – 240412

When you pick up a book by Freeman Wills Crofts you can be certain that you are going to be immersed in a detailed, often too detailed, account of a thorough investigation into a seemingly baffling and complicated mystery. His books are an acquired taste with no real pretensions to literature although he is a masterful storyteller and leaves his reader entertained, sometimes frustrated, and not a little baffled. The Sea Mystery, the fourth in his Inspector French series, originally published in 1928, is a case in point.

Characters do not simply go from A to B but with a gazetteer or a Bradshaws at hand Crofts details their precise route, as if challenging the reader to find a fault in the journey they have undergone. When French is presented with a dilemma or a decision as to which direction he should follow his investigations, it is as if the author is presenting his readers with a decision tree against which they can judge the sleuth’s actions. French is presented very much as a one man band, aided and abetted by various members of forces around the country for sure, but the focus of the narrative on the lead detective who makes all the calls on the direction of the case means that the reader discovers clues and is aware of significant revelations at the same time as French. The surprises are French’s surprises too.

French is by no means a super, omniscient investigator. His success is down to painstakingly thorough investigation of every aspect of the case, leaving no stone unturned. This is how he can identify the body of the victim stuffed in a large crate and fished out by amateur anglers,  Mr Morgan and his son, Evan, from the waters off Burry Port in Wales and work out from a few holes and a book of mechanical formulae how long the crate took to sink and where it had been thrown into the sea.

But French is also fallible. At the very moment that he preens himself for his brilliance in cracking a seemingly insoluble case, he realizes that he has made a series of disastrous mistakes that could have cost him his long sought after promotion to Chief Inspector and, more importantly, in a struggle at the end, his life. Not only did he allow his principal suspects escape, having been lured into a cleverly constructed trap, but he had also failed to identify the right culprit and indeed the victim. He is a man whose size nines are very much made of clay.

Sometimes, the bleedin’ obvious is the right answer and for all his cleverness, French fails to give due regard to the beneficiary of a murder involving a love triangle. By immersing the reader into the minutiae of French’s thought processes, Crofts is able to swamp them with so much detail that they are unable to see the woods for the trees. A second, more detached, pair of eyes might have saved French a lot of time and effort and question the very premise upon which his case is founded. The moral of the story is that you should be very careful whom you ask to identify a body.

To be fair to French, the culprits have gone to enormous, perhaps even ludicrous, lengths to conceal their guilt and make life difficult for the investigators. That French eventually gets there is no mean achievement. Although the book stands on its own, French reminisces about The Starvel Hollow Tragedy and a protagonist of The Cheyne Mystery receives a name check and, curiously, Crofts comments that the set up is very similar to his breakthrough novel, The Cask, presumably on the basis that anyone who picked up The Sea Mystery had read his earlier work.

Crofts is an acquired taste but if you are prepared to enter into the spirit, it is a worthwhile experience.

How New Zealand Appropriated Kiwi Fruit

By 1922 cultivars of Actinidia chinensis were available commercially with nurseryman, Hayward Wright, from Avondale, now part of suburban Auckland, describing the plant in his catalogue as “a wonderful fruiting climber” which bore a highly valuable new fruit that ripened over a long time during winter. It provided, he claimed, a welcome addition to the relatively meagre range of winter fruits. What he was offering became known as the Hayward cultivar.

Only in the late 1930s did the first commercial orchards and large-scale plantings of kiwi fruits were established and, even then, the produce was only destined for the domestic market. In 1952 when Jim MacLoughlin and Grahame Bayliss, exported kiwi fruits for the first time, thirteen tonnes of them, sending them to England. Within seventy years kiwi fruits have come to dominate the New Zealand commercial horticulture sector, with 184 million trays grown for export, generating, in 2021/22 NZD 2.911 billion in gross sales.

So successful was the Hayward cultivar that it spread worldwide, enabling other countries, such as the United States, Italy, and, in a case of sending coals to Newcastle, even China, to become large-scale producers of kiwi fruit, rivalling and, in some cases, surpassing New Zealand’s position in the global market. Sensing that the genie was well and truly out of the bottle, the New Zealand Kiwifruit Authority lobbied their government in 1982 to ban the export of kiwi plants and seeds, but their appeals fell on deaf ears. Astonishingly, the genesis of the Hayward cultivar and its subsequent iterations can be traced back directly to the seeds that Mary Fraser brought back from Yichang.

The names given to the fruit is a fascinating story in its own right. Once it had broken out of the confines of the Far East it was known as a Chinese Gooseberry, a misnomer as it was not related to the gooseberry, even if it was a berry and hairy and originated from China. Traders soon realized that the name met with consumer resistance as they sought new markets in the 1950s, gooseberries being out of favour and anti-communist sentiments militating against any link, real or imaginary, with Mao’s China.

After much head scratching, Turners and Growers, a fruit packaging company based in Auckland, came up with “melonette” in 1958, but even this proved to be problematic. At the time there were steep import tariffs imposed on melons and there was a fear that the fruit, although not a melon, would attract a prohibitive tax which would make it too expensive to tempt potential new customers.

The following year Turner and Growers’ marketing department pulled off a masterstroke. Recognising that the fruit looked vaguely like the flightless brown bird that the country had adopted as its national symbol since 1908, they appropriated its Maori name, kiwi, for their next attempt to rid it of its connotations with gooseberries. It was a stroke of genius, immediately associating a fruit that was native to the Chinese mainland with New Zealand. And the rest is history.

Curiously, even parts of the Chinese-speaking world have now adopted the name, albeit partially transliterated. In Hong Kong and Taiwan it is known as qi yi quo in Mandarin and kei yi awo in Cantonese, both meaning strange fruit, while an internet search of Mihou Tao still brings up plenty of results, mainly from the People’s Republic. Chinese gooseberries, on the other hand, seem to have sunk into oblivion.

And just to stir the pot further, the kiwi fruit is China’s national fruit. For aficionados of the fruit, though, they have much to thank Mary Fraser for.

Triple Quest

A review of Triple Quest by E R Punshon – 240409

The thirty-fourth and penultimate novel in Punshon’s long running Bobby Owen series was originally published in 1955 and has been reissued by Dean Street Press. As I approach the end of the series I have been eking the books out, savouring them like a gourmand, and in this novel Punshon does not disappoint. It is a complex story that has some twists and turns and a culprit whose identity is not obvious until the end.

Whether Punshon knew the end was nigh, by this time he was eighty-three, but he pulls out all the stops. There are some memorable characters, not least the wonderfully named Marmaduke Groan, a private investigator who comes to Owen with a story of a missing arts critic, Alfred Atts, but who is unable or unwilling to disclose the whole truth, and the art gallery attendant, Early Hyams, who reveres the paintings under his charge and despises the hoi polloi who give them barely a glance. There are also some picaresque characters like Monkey Baron and Irish Joe who aare no stereotypical ciphers but light up the page when they appear.

The dialogue is on occasions witty and there are some dramatic and thrilling episodes to enjoy. Owen is never one to pull out of a physical confrontation and manages to get the better of his unsavoury opponents from the demi-monde when he is set upon. He also is willing to risk his life by entering into a burning building to save Mrs Taylor who had only just finished demonstrating her displeasure at his appearance by launching a hail of missiles at him and threatening to shoot. Owen is also given the opportunity to demonstrate his proficiency as a lock picker.

Punshon’s narrative also shines a fascinating light on the times. The Owens have a new toy, a television set, and Atts is a new breed of person, a television celebrity who has graced the new fangled screens to talk about art. Not that Bobby Owen needs any crash course on how to appreciate art. Punshon’s sleuth has always been a little different from the normal policeman, educated, albeit with a third without honours from Oxford, from an aristocratic background, a connection that he has fought hard to play down during his career, with a tenacious desire to uncover the truth and the invaluable ability to be at the right place at the time.

He is also highly cultured with a love of art, a trait that pays dividends in a book which, following on from The Golden Dagger and Diabolic Candelabra, has an objet d’art at its heart. He remembers on a previous visit to the South Bank Gallery that Rembrandt’s Girl Peeling Apples made a deep impression upon him, but looking at it now it seemed an inferior work. Owen’s nose for the discrepancies in these feelings, coupled with a tip on mahogany – the work was painted on a mahogany panel, the wood not being available during the painter’s lifetime – leads him to realise that there is something odd going on at the gallery, most likely the substitution of fakes for the real thing.

Was this what Arthur Atts had rumbled and was about to reveal in a much hyped lecture, bringing disrepute to the gallery and getting revenge on its director, Sir Walter Wyatt, who had beaten Atts to discovering the painting in the first place? Was this why he conveniently disappeared just before delivering the lecture and where was Jasmine, the impoverished artist with a talent for reproducing masters but an even greater talent for original works, and where was the original painting? A meaty triple quest for Owen, aided by the faithful Ford, to get his teeth into.

Atts has his own dark secret, an emotional entanglement, and Wyatt’s suspicious behaviour adds some complexity to the plot, resolved amusingly and embarrassingly for the director and prompting Owen to exercise an astonishingly direct form of art criticism. As the story settles down and moves towards its thrilling finale another two bodies are added to those of Atts and Jasmine who, unsurprisingly, have been murdered. The book ends on a pleasing emotional high as Bobby Owen is able to ensure pride of place for Jasmine’s astonishing portrait of the Montgomery’s children and a source of income for the impoverished couple.

As a book it is one of Punshon’s best, an astonishing achievement and a veritable tour de force.

Crumlin Viaduct

At 200 feet high and 1,638 feet long it was described as “one of the most significant examples of technological achievement during the Industrial Revolution”, but all that remains of Crumlin Viaduct, a victim of Dr Beeching’s axe, are its stone supports. It was the highest railway viaduct in Britain and only the Aqueduct of Spoleto in Italy and the Portage Timber Viaduct in the United States were taller. It was also the least expensive bridge for its size ever constructed.

In 1846 an Act of Parliament granted permission for the building of the Taff Vale extension which would allow the coal mines of South Wales to access the developing industrial centres in the North West and Midlands of England. Its route required the track to cross the Ebbw Valley, an engineering feat that needed to overcome two significant geological features; the valley was tall, creating a structural problem as well as a wind problem as it acted as a wind tunnel, and there were actually two valleys, the Ebbw and the smaller Kendon.

Concluding that stone would be a poor choice for a structure of this size and type, Chief Engineer, Charles Liddell, recommended that a cast iron structure be built. After a tender process, the contract was awarded to a Scottish civil engineer, Thomas Kennard, who cast the iron structures at his Falkirk Ironworks and shipped them to Newport. Construction began in October 1853.

The first girder was hoisted into place on December 3, 1854 but during the maneuvering of the second, it buckled, slipped, and fell. One man, who was standing on the girder at the time, was killed and two others seriously injured, remarkably the only serious casualty during the construction phase. Made of wrought iron with stone supports, the seven span section across the Ebbw was completed in August 1855 and the three span section across the Kendon in the December at a total cost of £62,000 or £41 7s a foot.

The viaduct was officially opened on Whit Monday, June 1, 1857, by Lady Isabella Fitzmaurice and the occasion was marked by celebrations. Trains travelling across the viaduct and along the Western line beneath were decorated with flags, flowers, and evergreens. To entertain the locals beer booths, fun fairs, and side shows were set up in the fields and a couple of balladeers sang a song they had composed to celebrate the event. “Thousands come from far and near,/ so full of youth and bloom,/ To open the Great Crumlin Bridge/ on the Glorious first of June” it went and copies of the song sheet were available at a penny a time. The first train to cross was greeted with “loud shouts and roars, accompanied by the roar of the cannons and music from the band; it made a most spirit stirring occasion”, a contemporary report noted.

Although the Crumlin Viaduct was listed in 1962 as a site of architectural and historical interest, British Railways was allowed to demolish it after passenger services had stopped using it and because it was thought to be structurally unsound. The last passenger train to cross it was the 21.10 from Pontypool to Treherbert on June 13, 1964. Demolition began in the summer of 1966. Curiously, while the work was being carried out, the viaduct was used as a set for the film Arabesque, starring Gregory Peck and Sophia Loren.   

A Telegram From Le Touquet

A review of A Telegram from Le Touquet by John Bude – 240406

A Telegram from Le Touquet, originally published in 1956, has been recently reissued as part of the excellent British Library Crime Classics series. Taxonomically it is the twenty-second and penultimate in John Bude’s long-running William Meredith series, but, in truth, he plays only a minor albeit vital part in the tale. The heavy lifting in the investigation on the French Riviera is conducted by Inspector Blampignon of the Sûreté National, who featured in Bude’s earlier Death on the Riviera (1952).

The book falls into two unequal parts. The first part is narrated by Nigel Derry through whose eyes we are introduced to the main characters of the story and begin to understand the tensions and emotional undercurrents that are bubbling to the surface at his aunt Gwenny’s country house that Easter. To his astonishment his desire to marry Sheila, Gwenny’s ward, is vetoed without an adequate explanation. Gammon, an old soak and a beau of Gwenny’s, seems to be falling out of favour with a younger, more dapper Frenchman now in tow, and begins to make a beeline for Gwenny’s dowdy and naïve sister, Deborah Gaye. And there is some mystery surrounding the bohemian artist, Skeet, who seems to have some kind of hold on Gwenny and is involved in a knife fight with her latest beau, an occurrence that decides Gwenny to shut up the house at short notice and decamp to her holiday home in the south of France.

Gwenny never gets there. Her body is found in a trunk by her servants, the Fougères. To their surprise they had received a telegram from her advising them instead of arriving on the Sunday she would not reach the house until the Tuesday. Nigel also received a telegram, the eponymous missive from Le Touquet, inviting him unexpectedly to join his aunt. Some incriminating evidence that links him to her murder is found in a car.

The second part of the novel, which describes the events leading up to the discovery of the murder, the subsequent investigation and the revealing of the culprit, is narrated in the third party and, oddly, having done much to focus attention on Derry and to implicate him in the murder, Bude quickly absolves him of any involvement which, together with the switch of narrative focus, gives the book a very disjointed feel.

To add to the feeling of disappointment the culprit is easy to spot, although the locus of the murder and the herculean efforts required to get the body to the south of France show an astonishing degree of ingenuity. The motive, Gwenny’s hostility to the proposed marriage and Skeet’s hold over her are only revealed after a telephone call, the contents of which are not disclosed to the reader at the time but are pulled out of the chapeau with a Gallic flourish at the grand reveal. That the nuts and bolts of the crime are only revealed through a confession and the culprit suffers an all too convenient heart attack which eliminates any issues over which jurisdiction should deal with the murder adds to an overwhelming sense of anticlimax.

Blampignon is about as far removed from Poirot as you can imagine. Portly, sweaty, energetic, only uttering the occasional “Eh bien”, “Mon Dieu” and “Merde” to indicate his Gallic origin, his approach is less about engaging the little grey cells as rolling his sleeves up and getting stuck in. As he remarks at the end, the murderers only real mistake was to send that telegram. Had they not, they could easily have got away with murder.

The book is an entertaining enough read and the first part allows Bude to round his characters in the reader’s mind, but there are too many unsatisfactory features to make it a true classic.